Facebook Could ‘Lock You Out’ Unless You Upload A Clear Selfie”

November 29, 2017

The social networking giant Facebook will soon ask “upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face,” to prove that you are not a robot. This is a new kind of captcha to verify your identity feature that the company is working.

This news was first shared on Twitter as a screenshot on Tuesday and was verified by Facebook, which says: “Please upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face. We’ll check it and then permanently delete it from our servers.” The prompt also mentions that the picture will be removed permanently from Facebook servers.

This isn’t the first time Facebook is asking for pictures because recently the company asked users to upload their nudes to fight against revenge porn. In a statement to Wired, the company’s spokesperson said that the photo test is intended to “help us catch suspicious activity at various points of interaction on the site, including creating an account, sending Friend requests, setting up ads payments, and creating or editing ads.”

Another screenshot was posted on Twitter (now deleted) indicating that the users are locked out of their account until the photo was verified. The message said “You Can’t Log In Right Now. We’ll get in touch with you after we’ve reviewed your photo.”

A similar incident was reported on Reddit earlier this year which says “Facebook won’t let me log in, asks for me upload picture of myself, then says picture is invalid.”

This photo test is both automated and manual to detect any suspicious activity and authenticate the user. Facebook is lining up in the list of companies to adopt the Facial technology for authenticating users because we’ve seen Apple introduce the Face ID feature and completely ditch the touch ID in it’s recent iPhone X release.However, we don’t know how well the Facial technology is going to function but it sure has attracted various companies to adopt the feature.

What are your views on Facebook’s new selfie feature for verifying user’s identity? Share your views in the comments below!